tv Click BBC News October 8, 2022 12:30pm-1:00pm BST
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in the republic of ireland. now on bbc news, click. this week, the race to preserve ukraine's heritage and culture by sd scanning its buildings. phone too big? display too small? spencer has been looking at the latest flexi—screens that are coming around the bend. you couldn't do this with a solid glass tablet. we will try on some smart fabrics and a solar powered shirt. and sticking with style, are these the emperor's new clothes? lara has been trying on some threads
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that don't even exist. that's very cool. good job, i take my hat off to you. my virtual hat. lives lost, people displaced. the horrors of war are unimaginable. and the battle for ukraine goes on. russia no longer has full control of the southern and eastern regions it illegally annexed in the last week, and as the ukrainian army fights back and regains some of it stolen territory the huge damages to donetsk and kherson are being revealed. many ukranians have been saddened by the destruction of buildings and the loss of culture and history that comes with that. since the start of the war, unesco says almost 200 historic sites have been damaged. but what can't be saved physically can be saved virtually.
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over the years, we have looked at different ways of preserving buildings digitally, and now that technology is being used for a very urgent task. across ukraine, hundreds of buildings have stood for years as important cultural sites. but through the war, many have gone from this, to this. their architectural wonders becoming piles of rubble. every day, they destroy something really important in terms of cultural heritage. for example, yesterday in my native kharkiv, there were shellings and today as well, there were shellings of the central area of the city and as far as i know,
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some historical monuments and buildings have been damaged. and of course, it is also very important to preserve the heritage and also to tell the next generations about that. now eugene's company is helping to get high—powered scanners and training to the right people so they can create these incredibly detailed 3d scans. they hope it can be used at a later date to create exact replicas or in different ways in museums to display the history that has been lost in its physical sense. some of the technology they are using is already in use here at the british museum in london. they use it to scan objects allowing detailed replicas to be made made, or to help the experts to study them further. one of the scanners is the artec leo. it may be small but it is a powerful
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device and has a big pricetag. it costs more than 26,000 euros but has been donated to the project for free. the device has a few sensors and a projector. projector projects a pattern onto the object and this pattern is being deformed by the geometry of the object and then using this distortion, you can reconstruct the 3d. and then the algorithm in real time tries to understand how to match them perfectly, using the colour and geometry, and then it sticks everything together and you get the 360 degree model of the object. can i have a shot? of course. so let's see, i've hit the start button. opening the project, just wait until it tells you ready to scan, and you can scan away. great. and it is going to pick up all the little details? like these little flowers. exactly, exactly. what makes this scanner so good? you said it is the best. you can scan very fast and second, very precisely with a very good
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quality, and third, that you need less than an hour to train a person to do that, so it is very easy. so that's why now when there is no time and the war doesn't leave us a lot of time, we need in emergency to scan a lot of objects. that emergency needs a lot of help so another project has enlisted hundreds of people on the streets to use their smart phones. by downloading an app called polycam they can capture all sorts of objects from statues to cars. and could we do the whole building, the whole british museum? we could theoretically, but that would create massive data sets and so on, it would be far too much time consuming. maybe this staircase will go down in history. yeah, exactly. but in ukraine, they do need to scan whole buildings and generate huge amounts of data, but how much value does that actually hold? i think the key is how that data is used in the future.
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so digital preservation is, i suppose, the long—term challenge. but all bits of information are useful because culture is part of our dna, culture is what makes us human. it is precious but fragile and at times of conflict it's our duty to preserve and safeguard and promote it as far as we can. after so many months of fighting, the damage in ukraine is vast. it could be years before the true value of these scans and the information they can unlock is really known. one of the brilliant things about technology has been how itjust keeps on shrinking. we can squeeze more and more power into a smaller and smaller space,
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and that is why you now have the power of a supercomputer in your pocket. but there is one thing that limits just how small these things can get. the screen. in theory, your mobile device could keep on shrinking on shrinking but the problem is the screen that is attached to it would have to keep on shrinking too. that is attached to it would have imagine the possibilities if your device could shrink to whatever size and shape you wanted and the screen could just roll out to be whatever size you needed. early prototypes did look hopeful. this is a rollout e—ink display from 2007, not 1975 as the leather jacket might suggest. but it's the advent of oled technology that has allowed bright multicoloured flexible screens. they have ranged from rollout screens from lg that remind me a bit
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too much of a garage door to some really promising paper—thin demos from a chinese company. but it has just taken longer than hoped to get around that final bend. the big challenges with flexible displays is that the same properties that make them flexible and thin are also the same properties that make them very easy to damage and so if you were to pull apart a flexible display like you see inside some of these smart phones or laptops, the actual layer that is doing the lighting up is very thin, you could perhaps even wrap it around a cocktail stick, it is so thin. but that on its own is not going to survive any kind of real—world environment. at this year's ifa, we saw a permanently curved screen from samsung that you can twist but not bend and a screen from lg that you could bend orflatten if you decided you didn't like it. coming later this year is the asus zenbook.
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by day, it is a huge 17—inch touchscreen oled windows tablet computer with separate keyboard, but by night it's a 12.5 inch laptop. it comes with a shortcut that lets you pin different windows to different halves or quadrants of the display, and it certainly is eye catching, although i can see myself still using that separate keyboard. i've been watching flexible screen technology unfold, heh, for more than a decade now and i get it, i get the convenience of getting to have a big screen when you want a big screen and a smaller screen when you want a small one but right now it is just that bit in the middle that still worries me. at the moment, the touch controls on that middle hinge are just a bit hit and miss, and the idea ofjust that big fold still worries me. don't worry, spencer, look, the hinge as hard as nails,
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bendy as a banana, i don't know. they are keen to make the point that the folds are robust but the truth is, they are a point of weakness. phone manufacturers certainly are looking for anything that will help them stand out from the crowd. both huawei's xs 2 fold and samsung's fold 4 bends to a double width screen, albeit in opposite directions. but they allow that phone to become a tablet. both companies also have new versions of the flip form factor, but there are just so many opportunities to damage the inward folding screens and the outward folding screens. i don't think we know exactly yet what form factor effects a flexible display best works in. maybe it is a rollerball phone or a bendy phone but there is not
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enough experience there yet with real—world people using these devices to really understand what form factor makes sense. if i'm homest, none of the current selections are ideal, you either get a smaller device or a bigger screen but you don't get both and you certainly don't get that fantasy of a screen that can be whatever you want to be. ok, time for a look at this week's tech news now. it's on, it's off and it's on again. elon musk changed his mind again and said he will buy twitter after all. he has tweeted that it's part of a mysterious plan to create x, a so—called everything app that could incorporate a lot of services in one — a bit like wechat in china, maybe. a search engine free of ads and tracking that hopes to take on google is now available in the uk, france and germany. neeva has already had success in the us gaining more than 600,000 users. its founder used to be a senior executive at google and says that they need competition, even if it's tough.
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we have to start small as a start—up, we will took a long time to get where it is today but this is part reason why we are expanding. apple is closer to being forced to bring in usb—c charging on devices in the eu from 202a. it's after the european parliament voted in favour of a rule that all phones, tablets and wireless headphones sold in member countries must use the newer style port. and a company in california has unveiled its robotic french fry maker. the flippy2 automates the process of deep frying potatoes, onions and other foods in fast food restaurants. would you like chips with that? ok, time to talk clothes now, and i am taking spencer for a wardrobe update. true story — lara is my personal stylist.
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i give advice, but i'm not to blame for everything you wear. no, but i do always defer to your opinion. i am someone who thinks a fashion icon is a picture of a suit you click on. well, i have something here that is also a mix of tailoring and technology. we've been to meet a designer working on a shirt that can charge your phone. so this is one of the cut—offs that you saved, right? my name is pauline van dongen, this is my studio in arnhem, the netherlands. over the last ten years, i have been exploring the relation between our bodies and the environment through different senses — like the haptic sense, to raise our body awareness, and the audio sense by using music. testing the connection methods of solar cell to the textile. other projects are more about the emotional,
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for example issho, which is a denim jacket which gives you the sense of a stroke on your back. do you want to try it on? there is those four small vibration motors that give you the feeling of a gentle touch, basically. we started exploring solar technology in textile back in 2013, with the aim to bring solar technology closer to our bodies. what i really like with this sample is it gives you such an immediate visual feedback when you put your hands on it. this was pioneering at the time, because smartphones were rising, everyone was struggling with charging their phones, especially when they are out and about, and this t—shirt could actually solve that issue. you can play with texture, with colour, with translucency by weaving, and also this very early one with a very different filament as well. and by exploring the solar technology with your hands, you actually add a new emotional dimension to it. this is the colour we have used here, and we also
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used with the sample, which i think also works really well. but solar textiles can also be about much more than just fashion. this is suntex, our latest development and most efficient development in solar textiles. it is an architectural textile, so it can be used to cover buildings or create flexible structures. traditional panels are typically quite rigid, they are not very modular in a sense or deployable, and textiles in fact are very flexible and modular. so they have a great promise in that sense. the solar technology we are using, which is organic photovoltaics, the type of solar cell that has the lowest carbon footprint. but also you can imagine that this textile, while it doesn't match up with traditional silicon panels, has a much more holistic and aesthetic objective and of course it also generates much more social and cultural acceptance.
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if we were to retrofit an existing building with this textile as a facade, we would create enough energy to power its lighting over the course of a whole year. ten years ago, intelligent textiles were maybe a nice to have, but today with all the challenges in terms of sustainability and emotional wellbeing, textiles are really the solution we need. that was pauline van dongen with some smart clothes, some very smart clothes. yes. now i know how bored you get when you go shopping because i have been with you. i do, yep. do you usually shop online? you think i would, but i can't because i need to know that my clothes fit right and feel right and they hang right, so i can't. you have hit the nail on the head, because the problem is for most of us is when the clothes arrive, you don't tend to look the same when you put them on as the model online. who looks like a model? we have different body shapes
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and skin tones and hairstyles. yes, and with one in three online fashion purchases now being returned, it is costing retailers £7 billion per year. so they need a solution. and anna holligan has been to visit a company in amsterdam that hopes to use al to personalise our online shopping experiences. on click, we have seen digital supermodels carefully crafted over many months, and we have learned why designers want them. a digital model will become more in demand as it makes much more sense to put 3d clothes on 3d models. entirely digital fashion now often exists solely for social media. but the reality is physical clothing still results in about 100 million tonnes of waste every year, and that is mostly because of customers sending things back. but now, one start—up here in the heart of amsterdam's fashion district is hoping to change that, by using digital models to help
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online retailers clean up their act. this is lalaland. instead of painstakingly using cgi to create one or two digital supermodels, it uses artificial intelligence that can make all kinds of digital bodies in minutes. basically, we are going to have you considering your own fashion you configuring your own fashion model, generating the synthetic models using artificial intelligence that then consumers can relate towards, which solves a massive problem of people feeling underrepresented while shopping online. the idea is a retailer can make digital models they think shoppers will want to see, choosing skin tone, size, facial features and hairstyles injust a click. so that is short, curly... and then we go to body shape...
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yeah, which we have apple, rectangle, pear and triangle. i have always had a nightmare myself, shopping, only seeing one type of complexion model. the closer the model is to you, the better idea you will have of what the clothes will look like in reality. it is notjust colourising or making someone look dark brown or light brown, it is really trying to take all characteristics that you would have on real humans. south americans with bigger hips, or dark brown people with bigger lips... shops then add garments, picking poses and fits. first, the before, which was just the model, and after, which is a model wearing your product items. that is insane! is this the end of the supermodel, then? you need your gigi hadids, your kendalljenners to drive traffic towards a web store.
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so brands have to stop selling the dream and start selling the reality. exactly when the consumer enters the online shopping environment. so shops can essentially plug more relatable models straight into their stores. but there could come a time where shoppers can create avatars in their exact image as well. so i made a version of myself. complete with scottish skin and 92" frame. this is probably quite accurate, although i have never actually thought about it before. i think she should have a bit more on her hips. i'm not sure if that actually makes me want to buy the clothes more or less, but you do undoubtedly get a better understanding of what the clothes might really look like on you. exact measurements aside, this could have transformative potential,
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notjust on fashion but beyond. but it's notjust virtual models. as a toned down london fashion week took to the catwalks last month, there was a show with a difference, and i got a sneak preview beforehand. welcome to the show. thank you! you are going to need this. 0k~ — and when you are ready, ijust need you to press begin. these models aren't actually wearing the clothes, and in fact the clothes on show will never physically exist. this is screenwear, fashion in augmented reality, coming to social networks and video calls near you soon. or now, if you want it. ar fashion designer doddz has worked with big names including dior, adidas and amazon, and talked me through his collection ahead of the big day.
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he has a balaclava on, is that in fashion these days? you could create anything you want to, but a bit of realism is actually more effective in some ways. absoutely. and digitalfashion, it is new for a lot of people, the sort of high—end abstract eccentric thing might be a huge gap for people to take. invisible woman, is this part of the show? yeah, yeah! i didn't know if something had gone wrong. this is all part of it. just clothes walking by themselves! how does it work, you buy an item then you own it forever? yes, you buy an item like you would on any e—commerce site, upload a photo and then it's almost like receiving it in the post the next day or something, you will get a photo with you wearing your outfit and then you will have access to these ar effects which will put the clothes on to you instantly. and unlike a regular fashion show, you can even try the clothes on. oh, that looks nice and warm — not that i can feel it, obviously.
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oh, great, you can see it all the way round. the outfits are created in 3d software with 32 points of body tracking to match them to — in this instance on snapchat�*s platform. they have been developed for instagram too. of course, i haven't come empty—handed, so i have made you your own digital picture. or i have made an outfit. in this case i have taken a photo from your instagram, but you would upload a photo in this case and then i would pose this mannequin that we see here in a similar position that you are in, in the photo. i will bring it over to this separate software... oh, wow, a hat and everything. it looks like i am wearing it, the angle is incredible, you still have my hand poking through there, that is really believable. the stills are pretty impressive, but file size and internet connection are still challenges for the ar video versions. and while they are off
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to a decent start, they will get a lot better over time. i have an augmented reality hat. that is very cool. good job, i take my hat off to you, my virtual hat. i really wanted this to work! i know! nice idea, hey. we could do with some screenwear on this programme, then i could turn up in pyjamas and they could decide what i wear in the edit. tempting. let's leave it there shall we, dangerous times ahead. that is it from a highly fashionable click for this week, thanks for watching, we will see you soon. bye— bye. hello, it's a very pleasant autumn weekend, particularly in the south and east of the country throughout. to the north and west, after a lovely day today,
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tomorrow we start to see wet and windy weather gradually push its way in. this area of cloud gathers pace and slowly creeps towards us. a lot of the cloud is high cloud in the sunshine, a bit of shower cloud as well, shower already faded in parts of north—west england, northern ireland, one or two in northern parts of scotland and to the west but more cloud pushing into the orkney and shetland area as we end the afternoon. temperatures not far off from where they were yesterday, although cooler in the south. a bit more sunshine around and lighter winds. lighter winds in england and wales means a cold night, not so much for parts in scotland, cloud and rain approaching, and like this morning, two, three celsius across parts of the midlands and east anglia. under the area of high pressure, pulling away, low pressure dominating in the north and west and this will bring more heavy rain
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under the area of high pressure, pulling away, dry, low pressure dominating in the north and west and this will bring more heavy rain after a wet week in western scotland. a dry start in scotland and northern ireland but rain spreads in from the west, not too much in the north—east of scotland but where we do see rain in the hills in the west, it will be heavy. brighten up in the highlands and islands later. we could start to see cloud and rain in cumbria, anglesey, by the time we finish the afternoon dry and sunny, but feeling warm enough, the breeze strongest in north—west scotland. cloud, outbreaks of rain spreads southwards across england and wales, this weatherfront here, a cool front brings a dip in temperatures in monday, the cold front lingering across east anglia and the south—east as we start the day, fairly fragmented, it should clear quickly and back to sunny spells for many, a scattering of showers mainly in the north and west, and it will feel cooler compared
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